I am looking for some kind of service that will let me do this, since I do not have a available server to configure. I tried playing around with forward settings in hotmail, gmail, etc. but I cannot make it change the sender address.

is this a legitimate request? will it be used for good or evil?
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Jeff Atwood♦Oct 5 '09 at 0:18

2

Good, I believe. Receivers are mail-to-content services at sites like Posterous, Tumblr and Flickr. Senders are members of a non-profit organization who sends faxes with content to the webmaster instead of learning the interwebs. Evil if our webmaster gets a kick out of beeing a human-computing-driven fax-to-metaweblog-api gateway. I doubt it.
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HallgrimOct 5 '09 at 22:09

6 Answers
6

I use E4ward for that purpose. E4ward allocates aliases, which look like alias@username.e4ward.com. I give out these aliases, and E4ward forwards emails sent to them to my real email address, but with a tricked return address that I can use to respond such that my answer would seem to come from the alias.

The advantage in that kind of service is that I'm less exposed to spam, and when I do receive an unsolicited email I know exactly who is to blame.

I have tried a dozen such services before settling on E4ward as the best.
I used a free account for a couple of months, and was so satisfied that I paid the $10 yearly subscription.
Their service is very complete, missing only the feature of auto-expiring aliases, which I don't need.

E4ward.com is a down-to-earth and very
useful disposable email service that
makes it easy to prevent spam to your
real email address with easily
erasable aliases. You can use your own
domain with E4ward.com, but auto-expiring aliases
are not offered.

E4ward.com lets you set up unlimited disposable email
addresses.

You can set up custom aliases or use random characters to make
guessing more difficult.

Each E4ward.com can have a memo to help you remember which site or use
it was set up for.

E4ward.com lets you create aliases for multiple real email addresses.

You can use aliases at your own domain name with E4ward.com.

E4ward.com protects your real address even in replies by routing
them through its servers.

Sign on with a web hosting company which gives you SSH access and the ability to tweak your own mail settings. Then set up procmail to do this. My host does this for $10/month.

Use a local mail client to do this. At the moment I have a rule set up in my University Mail program (a Web version of Outlook, connected to their Exchange server) to do just what you're asking. (In fact I wish I could do real forwarding where it looks like the email actually came from its original recipient, but that client won't allow it.) If you do this, all the email will be downloaded and then resent.

Talk to an email forwarding service (like pobox.com), explain your case, and see what they can do for you. It's a pretty simple request, which they may not offer as a stock option simply because most people want their forwarded mail to show the original sender.

I faced a similar problem and used Google Apps Script for Gmail to fix it. I augmented Pascal Richter's script. For the script to work, I made a new Gmail account, set up a filter called 'Pics' that grabs every email with an attachment. The script checks the Label every minute and forwards all of the messages to Tumblr. To get it to work for you, you'll have to:

Either use the label name Pics or update the labelName in the script

Update the email@tumblr.com address in this script to your custom email address

Add a trigger so that this script runs with whatever frequency you'd like